U.S. Supreme Court and criminal rights

IDENTIFICATION: Highest court in the US justice system

SIGNIFICANCE: As the highest court of appeal in the United States, the Supreme Court has played an important role in shaping the American criminal justice process, especially in regard to the interpretation of the rights of criminal suspects.

The legal basis for the creation of the US Supreme Court can be found in Article III of the US Constitution, which was ratified in 1789. The Constitution does not spell out the Court’s specific responsibilities and powers, but the Court has come to play a central role in the American political system in interpreting the constitutional bases of laws and exercising the power of final judicial review over all appeals that reach it from state and lower federal courts.

The Court’s power of judicial review empowers it to declare governmental acts unconstitutional. Judicial review is controversial because it appears undemocratic when a president signs a law approved by a majority of the people’s representatives in Congress, only to have a majority of the Court’s nine justices—none of whom is elected by the people—declare the law unconstitutional. The principle of judicial review was established in 1803, in the landmark case of Marbury v. Madison , in which the Supreme Court ruled that the power was implied within the judiciary’s duty to interpret the law.

Early History

During the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century, the Supreme Court played a significant role in defining the structure and institutions of the American political system. The Court issued rulings that defined the powers of the national government and its relationship with the states and also interpreted the powers of the executive and legislative branches of government. During that period, however, the court performed only a minor role in matters related to civil liberties, including the rights of criminal defendants. After the US Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1925, the court began expanding its role in the political system by interpreting the scope of the freedoms listed in the Bill of Rights and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Also known as the Judges’ Bill, the Judiciary Act of 1925 established the Supreme Court’s discretionary jurisdiction, which has given the court more flexibility in case selection. The modern court selects cases for review without interference from Congress, although Article III of the US Constitution gives Congress the power to define the process of how cases are appealed to it. The power of Congress to define the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court is one of the checks within the system of checks and balances established by the Framers of the Constitution. However, commercialization, urbanization, and industrialization made laws so complex that Congress decided that the court was better able to select cases for itself.

The Judiciary Act also established the writ of certiorari petition, which has since become the most common way for cases to be accepted for review by the Supreme Court. Parties appealing decisions to the court must file writs of certiorari requesting that relevant lower court records be delivered to the Supreme Court. Four of the nine justices on the court must vote in favor of a writ of certiorari petition for a case to be granted review.

Throughout the twentieth century, the Supreme Court incorporated nearly all the protections of the Bill of Rights to make them apply to state governments through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment . Before the Bill of Rights protections were extended to the states, their protections were guaranteed in federal courts, but not necessarily in state or local courts. However, the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified immediately after the Civil War to protect newly freed slaves, asserted that states could not deny due process to all their citizens. The Court used the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause as a vehicle to require the individual states to respect most of the freedoms and protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

The Court and Rights of Criminal Defendants

The incorporation of the Bill of Rights upon states was especially significant for persons accused of crimes because about 90 percent of criminal cases are tried in state and local courts. Before the Bill of Rights protections were incorporated, it was common for criminal defendants to be treated roughly by law-enforcement officials during searches and seizures and interrogations and by prosecutors and judges in trials in ways that are now no longer permitted. Criminal suspects were frequently denied due process of law in states whose constitutions and local practices ran contrary to the rights of criminals defined in the federal Bill of Rights.

The Warren Court

With the appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice of the United States by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, the Supreme Court began an era of liberal interpretations of criminal defendants’ rights. Warren expanded the meaning of criminal defendants’ rights by nationalizing most of the liberties during the 1960s and by establishing a code of conduct for police officers in dealing with criminal suspects. Landmark decisions by the Warren court revolutionized the criminal justice system by providing more protection for criminal defendants. For example, the court’s decision in Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963 required states to provide attorneys for defendants accused of felonies who could not afford their own representation. The court’s 1966 decision in Miranda v. Arizona required police officers to inform suspects of their right to remain silent and their right to counsel.

The Warren court did not rule directly on the constitutionality of the death penalty. However, in Trop v. Dulles (1958), it established that punishments had to meet evolving standards of decency or risk violating the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause.

The Warren court also nationalized a controversial principle known as the exclusionary rule in its landmark Mapp v. Ohio decision in 1961. The exclusionary rule bars illegally obtained evidence from being used in court against criminal defendants. The rule is controversial because guilty defendants might be set free if crucial evidence is excluded from trials. The rule applies to illegal police searches and coercive interrogations conducted by police officers without the presence of attorneys to advise suspects. Hence, the exclusionary rule relates to provisions in the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments.

While political liberals applauded the Warren court’s rulings, conservatives were offended by them and viewed the Supreme Court as “soft on crime.” It was common during Warren’s era to see billboards calling for Warren’s impeachment, especially in conservative states such as Texas and Indiana.

Conservative Counterrevolution

In reaction to the Warren court’s liberal decisions, Richard M. Nixon campaigned for the presidency in 1968 on a “law and order” platform. A Republican, Nixon promised the voters that he would appoint conservative justices to the Court who would favor law-enforcement officers, or what he called the “peace forces.” After Nixon was elected, he had the unusual fortune of appointing four justices to the court during his first term. His appointments included Chief Justice Warren Burger , who served on the court from 1969 until 1986.

Republican Presidents Ronald W. Reagan and George Bush followed Nixon’s lead by appointing six justices to the court during the 1980s and early 1990s, including Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist in 1986. Meanwhile, no Democratic president appointed a justice between 1968 and 1993. The increased conservatism the Republican appointments gave to the court significantly altered the court’s rulings in a variety of areas, including criminal justice.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the Supreme Court handed down rulings that created exceptions to allow illegally obtained evidence to be used in criminal trials. For example, the court allowed police officers to conduct searches with invalid warrants when they acted in “good faith.” The court also created a “public safety” exception to allow police to coerce suspects into providing information about locations of dangerous weapons in public places. This exception allowed police to avoid the problems associated with issuing Miranda warnings during emergency situations in which speedy police action was crucial. The Supreme Court also created the “inevitable discovery” exception to admit illegally obtained evidence into court under the presumption that if such evidence had not been obtained illegally, it would have been found eventually.

Exceptions such as these are examples of how Warren court decisions have been interpreted in a more conservative manner by the Burger and Rehnquist courts. However, while legal scholars agree that a conservative counterrevolution has, in fact, occurred since Warren retired in 1969, many of his court’s landmark decisions, such as Gideon, Miranda, and Mapp, have not been overturned. However, these decisions have been interpreted to provide more support for law-enforcement officials, prosecutors, and judges in their battle against criminal defendants.

The post-Warren court has also made conservative rulings in matters of sentencing and punishment. In Gregg v. Georgia (1976), for example, the court ruled that the death penalty did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause. The Rehnquist court has also made it easier to apply the death penalty by issuing decisions that limit the number of federal appeals for death row inmates, to allow states to execute defendants under the age of eighteen, and to allow relatives of murder victims to issue emotional statements to juries during the sentencing phases of death penalty trials. Although more than one-half of death row inmates are of African American and Hispanic heritage, the court ruled in McClesky v. Kemp (1987) that the death penalty was not being implemented in a racially discriminatory manner. Clearly, the rights of criminal suspects had been limited by the decisions of the Burger and Rehnquist courts, while a movement favoring a strict enforcement of the laws had been expanded.

President George W. Bush nominated John Glover Roberts to take over as chief justice upon the death of Rehnquist in 2005. As of 2024, under Roberts's reign, the court had handed down several important controversial decisions such as overturning Roe v. Wade in June 2022, ending the Constitutional right to abortion, and other topics such as the environment, gun rights, health care, campaign finance, and same-sex marriage. As for criminal rights, the court passed rulings that limited police searches during arrests, protected the privacy of information stored on cell phones in terms of evidence, and prohibited the placement of global positioning system (GPS) devices on the vehicles of suspects.

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